Advertising Your Mobile App – 4 Ads to Learn From

From producing an iPhone app, I know how difficult app marketing and driving downloads can be.

Discoverability in the App Store is a mess and it seems like only apps at the top of the charts get downloads.

Harder still is being able to track which activities are actually getting results due to the opaqueness of app store reporting.

Mobile app advertising on sites like Facebook and now Twitter are proving to be very effective and trackable user acquisition channels.

So if you have a free app, why should you spend money on advertising it?

Either:

A.) You have In-App Purchases. Games crush at this. It might cost them $2 to get you as a user through ads but they can count on you spending $10 on gems and upgrades.

B).) The app is very high use and has been optimized with ad placements to max revenue.

C.) You want to use ads as a kickstart to drive downloads so that it rises up the charts to get more organic downloads – which drivers it even further up the charts.

Let’s look at a few app ads I saw yesterday that you can learn from for promoting your app:

Mile Tracker

“Use a personal car for work? Log every mile and claim $1000s from your tax return!”

The copy here is pretty good. It addresses a very specific problem. Altough it could dig into the problem a little more and bring out the pain even further.

What’s the pain? My current system for tracking miles is disorganized and when I don’t accurately track them I lose money.

The image shows a guy driving and a screenshot of the app – but you can’t really tell what’s going on in the screenshot. This could be improved by making that screen something less busy so that you can see what’s going on and get a better preview of the app.

Ready

I’ve been in a relationship for a few years and my Facebook profile reflects this.

But what appears to be a dating app is still showing in my feed.

They could be doing a better job targeting by selecting to only target single people.

The copy is also incredibly vague. Why do I need ready? What do you do??

EasilyDo

“Go from your meeting to soccer practice to dinner with ease.”

They’re trying to paint a picture of how EasilyDo fits into your life.. but I’m not sure how many people in the working world still play soccer.

They could hyper target the ad copy to working professionals with different hobbies. For example:

An ad variation for working professionals who like tennis: “Go from your meeting to tennis to dinner with ease.”

An ad variation for working professionals who like CrossFit: “Go from your meeting to CrossFit to dinner with ease.”

They could also get better performance by having different ads with different age level models holding the phone, and then show the new ad of the guy in his 20s to people of the same age.

Kamino

This ad does a good job of personalizing by location.

The image is of the Venice canals which is about 10 minutes away from me. It instantly jumped out at me because I instantly recognized it.

If it was an image of something in Chicago it might not have gotten my attention.

This could possibly be improved by including a mention of LA in the copy as well.